


[Fandom stats] How many very small fandoms are there?

by toastystats (destinationtoast)



Series: Fandom Stats [86]
Category: Fandom - Fandom
Genre: Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-09-12 15:17:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16875231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destinationtoast/pseuds/toastystats
Summary: A response to a prompt: "Is there a way to see how many AO3 fandoms have less than X number of works?"





	[Fandom stats] How many very small fandoms are there?

**Author's Note:**

> Originally [posted to Tumblr.](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/169452065079/dear-toast-i-was-doing-a-google-search-for-a)

@conversationswithjohnlock asked: 

> Dear Toast, I was doing a google search for a particular AO3 stat, and although I didn’t find the stat, I did find your wonderful blog. Is there a way to see how many AO3 fandoms have less than X number of works? I was scrolling through the alphabetical list of movie fandoms and couldn’t believe how many fandoms have only 1-5 works. I’d love to see a stat like “87% of AO3 fandoms have less than 5 works,” or something like that. Is that possible? Also, your cats are adorable! Happy new year!

Hey – thanks for your lovely note!  And belated happy new year to you as well.  :D

Good question!  As with so many things, fandom size follows a power law – most fandoms have few fanworks, while relatively few are large.  But I didn’t have exact numbers, until I ran an analysis just now:

The fandom size is on the x-axis (log scale to make it easier to see the line).  This graph says that 35% of the fandoms on AO3 have only 1 fanwork.  62% of fandoms have 5 or fewer fanworks, and so on.  While there are a few fandoms with over 100K fanworks, I stopped the graph there, because almost all fandoms have fewer than that – in fact, less than 1% of fandoms have 10K or more fanworks!

While one could feel sad for all the fandoms with only 1 fanwork, here are a few things to remember that cheer me up: 

  * Sometimes people misunderstand fandom tags and stick other things in there instead.  E.g., “[(prolly the film but shoot ur fuckin shot my dude!)](http://archiveofourown.org/tags/\(prolly%20the%20film%20but%20shoot%20ur%20fuckin%20shot%20my%20dude!\)/works)“ and other quirky items which can be found in [Uncategorized Fandoms](http://archiveofourown.org/media/Uncategorized%20Fandoms/fandoms).  (Although I actually did exclude “Uncategorized Fandoms” from this particular analysis, so I guess that’s not adding to the above stats.)  

  * Sometimes people use different names for the same fandom, and the AO3 tag wranglers haven’t gotten around to uniting them all yet.  E.g., I wrote a fic with the fandom tag “[Ana Ng - They Might Be Giants (Song)](http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Ana%20Ng%20-%20They%20Might%20Be%20Giants%20\(Song\))” which was initially just in its own little fandom, but eventually got wrangled under [They Might Be Giants](http://They%20Might%20Be%20Giants), which is itself within [Bandom](http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Bandom/works) (so now it’s in those larger fandoms, too).
  * Which brings me to another point: for some of the fandoms that have only one work in them, that fanwork also belongs to bigger fandoms.
  * And anyway, it’s pretty awesome how many diverse sources fans have drawn inspiration from when creating fanworks!  :D




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